The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-07-02
THE AMERICAN WESTERN MAN.
c. E. Warner, i'm Harper's.

IAC liIdIi, LAlC DIdWCI
 imagines, only developes himself and spreads himself and grows "for all he 1 is worth" in the great west. He is more free and Timber there, and un- folds those generous peculiarities and largenesses of humanity which never blossomed before. The "environment" has much to do with it. The great space over which he roams contributes to the enlargement of his mental hori- zou. There have been races before who roamed the illimitable desert, but they travelled on foot or on camel back, and were limited in their range. There was nothing continental about them, as there is about our railway desert travellers, who swing along through thousands of miles of sand and sage bush with growing con- tempt for time and space. But ex- pansive and great as these people have become under the new conditions, the ''Drawer" has a fancy that the de- velopment of the race has only just begun, and that the future will show us in perfection kind of man new to the world. Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert of one day was like the desert of the day before, and the Pullman car rolls and swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under it's black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning when the men were wait ing their turns at the ablution bowls, slip of boy perhaps aged seven, stood balancing himself on his little legs, clad ill knickerbockers, biding his time, with all the nonchalance of all old campaigner. "How did you sleep, cap?" asked a well-meaning elderly gentleman. "Well, thank you," was the dignified response; "as always do on sleeping car" AL ways does? Great horrors! Hardly out of his swaddling clothes, and yet he always sleeps well in sleeper ! Was he born on the wheels? was he cradled ina Pullman? He has always been in motion probably; he was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this marvellous boy of our new era. He was not born in house at rest, but the locomotive snatched him along with a shriek and roar before his eyes were fairly open, and he was rocked in ''sectiop," and his first sen- sation of life was that of moving rap idly over vast arid spaces, through cattle ranges and along canons.
 The effort of quick and easy locomo- tion on character may have been noted before, but seems that here is the pro- ductiOn of new sort of man, the di- rect product of our railway era. It is not simply that this boy is nature, but he must be different and mo- bier sort of boy than the one born, say, at home or on canal boat; for whether he was born on railroad or not, he belongs to the railway system of civilization. Before he gets into trousers he is old ill experience, and bas discounted many of the novelties that usually break gradually on the pilgrim in this world. He belongs to the new expansive race that must live in motion, whose proper home is the Pullman (which will probably be inn proved in time into dustless, sweet smelling, well-aired bedroom), and whose domestic life will be on the wing, so to speak. The interstate commerce bill will pass him along without friction from end to end of the union, and perhaps uniform di- vorce law will enable him to change his marital relations at any place where he happens to dine. This promising lad is only faint intima- tion of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire the freedom of the continent, and come into that ex- pansiveness of feeling and of language which characterizes the great west. It is burst of joyous eXuberance that comes from the sense of an illimitable horizon. It shows itself in the tender worlds of a local newspaper at Bowie, Arizona, on the death of beloved citizen; "'Death loves shining mark and she hit dandy when she turned loose on Jim." And also in the clos ing words of New Mexico obituary, which the Kansas Magoziae quotes: "Her tired spirit was released from the pain -racking body and scared aloft to eternal glory at 4.30, Denver time." We die, as it were, in motion, as we sleep, and there is nowhere any boundary to our expansion. Perhaps we shall never again know any rest as we now understand the term-rest be- ing only change of motion-and we shall not be able to sleep except on the cars, and whether we die by Den yer time or by the ninetieth meridian, we shall only change our time.
 Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant, and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race! The only thing that can possi- bly hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; we have abolished